Media Mouse was in attendance for the Counter Military Recruitment Conference at Carnegie Mellon University this past weekend. Over 100 people from across the country were in attendance for the conference organized by the Pittsburgh Organizing Group (POG) and the Carnegie Mellon University Progressive Student Alliance (CMUPSA).
It was evident that a great deal of effort went into organizing the event, as all areas of need for those coming from outside of Pittsburgh such as housing and food were effectively covered, in addition to the variety of workshops offered. Every session attended by this writer was informational, interesting, and even fun. All areas of relevance to counter-recruiting (CR) were thoroughly covered, and CMUPSA and POG deserve much praise for the weekend.
Many of the sessions were led by activists from POG who have carried out an extensive CR campaign over the past several years. All session leaders had a refreshingly astute analysis of specific actions within the context of their overall campaign against recruiters. Far too often, activists from both the traditional liberal and more radical milieus cling to their ideas of what effective organizing tactics and actions are with an almost fundamentalist zeal, engaging in said organizational tactics and actions based on their moral analysis rather than analyzing what type of action would make the most sense tactically in a campaign. During the weekend, there were different ideas on what those tactically intelligent actions are (which is a necessary and important debate for anyone serious about effectively challenging structures of exploitation and oppression), but such debate was relatively free of individuals strictly adhering to rigid ideologies of acceptable and unacceptable resistance. All of this is not to say that the entire activist community in Pittsburgh does not get stuck in ideological ruts when planning actions with and without other groups—according to some from the city, the opposite is true—but it does show that it is possible for groups to move beyond such time- and energy-wasting arguments and that groups are much more effective when they do so. It would do well for activists in Grand Rapids to take note of this.
Another session dealt with the “military industrial academic complex” and specifically its relation to Carnegie Mellon University. The term “military industrial complex” was coined by President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell speech and refers to the relationship between the armed forces, the private arms industry, and political interests in the United States. (For an introduction to this concept, see Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight.) Years later, Senator J. William Fulbright added “academic” to the term, saying that there existed a ”military industrial academic complex” in the United States due to the militarization of academia. Several students from Carnegie Mellon attested to this militarization at their school, as a robotics student, a Spanish student, and even a philosophy graduate student told of how they had all been offered research opportunities funded by grants from various branches of the Department of Defense. This, the presenters said, reflected the complex workings of the military industrial academic complex. Military recruitment is typically thought of as young people with few economic opportunities being shipped off to faraway lands to kill or be killed. But those soldiers depend on the highly advanced technology developed and researched by students and professors in universities across the country. Recruitment, then, involves both economically disadvantaged youths fighting wars and largely middle- and upperclass people providing them with the advanced tools to do so. At Carnegie Mellon, 75% of research in the robotics program is funded through the Department of Defense, part of which went towards the research and development of, among other things, the Gladiator, a vehicle which not only does not require people to drive it, but does not require people to determine its actions by remote control, as it effectively has a mind of its own. The Gladiator contains a machine gun and slots for shooting crowd control devices such as tear gas or flash grenades. The Marine Corps hope to have it for use overseas by next year. The social implications of such research are obvious: it militarizes universities, normalizes research which is for the sole purpose of killing people, comes at the expense of humanitarian research, militarizes local economies, advances the asymmetric military capabilities between the U.S. and the rest of the world and therefore U.S. global domination, and makes going to war much easier. The presenters said a four part strategy was necessary for dealing with military research: exposure, helping those in highly militarized fields to avoid it, putting ethics back into the discussion, and direct action.
One of the final sessions of the conference dealt with the current crackdown on dissent in the United States. A lawyer working with the National Lawyer’s Guild, an association of lawyers working for progressive change that frequently represents activists in legal cases, gave some history on such crackdowns in the U.S., citing the Palmer Raids, jailing of dissenters during World War II, and COINTELPRO, to name a few. Another presenter discussed the parallels between the repressive environment of the 1960’s and today, citing police tolerance, police-protestor communication, use of force by police, and the extent and manner of arrests. He discussed the highly militarized model for dealing with protests known as the Miami Model, named as such because of its use during the 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) protests in Miami, Florida. The techniques were described as a “model for homeland defense” by Miami mayor Manny Diaz and involves. The presenter described its goals as preventing public assembly, marginalize protesters and protest movements (as in Miami, where massive public relations campaigns were carried out months before the protest in an attempt to convince local residents thousands of violent anarchists were to descend on their city and destroy it), and the justification of the model’s use. The model can also be seen as an important component of the military industrial complex, as it requires massive numbers of police using large quantities of high-tech, expensive weaponry--$8 million from the initial $87 billion spent on Iraq went to the police of Miami in preparation for the FTAA. The increased militarization of police, the presenter stressed, was just one part of the larger context of repression of dissent, in addition to information warfare, intelligence gathering, and extravagant sentences for arrested activists (such as Jeffrey Luers’ 22 year sentence for burning three SUVs or the jail sentences typically ranging from three to sixth months for activists opposing the School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia).
The conference included several other sessions dealing specifically with strategies in CR. POG has significant experience in this field and have finely tuned the methods in their campaign. The weekend was an enlightening one for those wishing to establish a successful CR campaign in their communities. One can only hope Grand Rapids can become one of these cities.
To get involved with the local counter-recruitment campaign, contact the Grand Rapids chapter of Students for a Democratic Society at grandrapidssds at riseup dot net.
